Inertia based filtering of high resolution images using a GPU cluster

The scheme of inertia based anisotropic diffusion is a very powerful noise reducing and structure preserving image processing operator. This paper presents an implementation of this time consuming filter process on a cluster of Nvidia Tesla high performance computing processors, which can be applied to very large amounts of data in only a few minutes. Applying the inertia based diffusion filter to high resolution image stacks of neuron cells provides fully automatic geometric reconstructions of these images on a scale of <1μm. Such a high throughput and automatic image processing tool has great impact on various research areas, in particular the fast growing field of computational neuroscience, where one encounters increasing amount of microscopy data that needs to be processed.